Winter of '63
by RWBYSage
Summary: The Avengers probably haven't experienced the feeling of boredom in ages. So what happens when they are left with too much free time on their hands?


**My triumphant return! And by triumphant I mean just a very short story containing sheer madness. Anyway, I hope I can get to do this more often now that I'm in college. Wish me luck on that, and I hope you enjoy this.**

 **~Sage**

* * *

A rare and unusual slow day marred the Avengers compound, leaving the few heroes on its grounds with a feeling that they never thought they would ever experience again: boredom. It was a sight everyone should behold, yet no one would still believe, seeing Earth's mightiest saviors struggling to find something to do. With several of the building's usual inhabitants off adhering to their own personal matters, such as Tony and Rhodey maintaining operations at Stark Tower, and T'Challa representing the group at a United Nations meeting, the ones who remained had their options limited.

Sam Wilson, without his carbon fiber wings that marked him as Falcon, sat at a table, peering at his laptop screen with particular detail. Natasha Romanoff, known to the public as Black Widow, found herself relaxing in a chair by the window with her focus on a good book, her usual tight black attire replaced by more casual clothing. Her fellow agent, Clint Barton, shifted his attention between tampering with the newest type of arrow to be set in his quiver and contacting his family via text. Captain Steve Rogers smiled to himself upon seeing his comrades so caught up in little activities. However, his grin faded upon turning to see his closest friend, James Buchanan Barnes, sitting alone in the corner, looking quite nervous. He walked over and sat down to the man with the metal left arm while placing a comforting hand on his shoulder.

"You can let your guard down, Bucky. Stark is gone. The people here see you as a man, not the Winter Soldier. No one here has a problem with you," Cap said with a reassuring smile. Bucky smiles back softly and nods, remembering that everyone in the room currently had sided with him during their most recent conflict.

"I wouldn't exactly say that last part, Steve," Sam chimed in from across the room, looking up past his laptop. "He is the reason why I needed a new pair of wings."

"Hey, I apologized for that. Why didn't you just call your little birdy drone to pick you up anyways?" Bucky teasingly retorted.

"His name is Redwing and he's a cute bird! Maybe you should take notes about being cute anyways. You look homeless with that haircut," Sam responded. Bucky grumpily glared at him while he got up and walked over to the fridge.

"Could you get me a drink while you're over there?" Bucky asked without losing any bitterness. Sam nodded and handed to Barnes a moment later a glass full of nothing but ice. When he looked up at Sam with a confused expression, Sam simply smirked and said, "Wait 45 minutes."

"You're a dick," Bucky said.

"Alright that's enough you two! And watch your language, Buck," Steve said, cutting the both of them off as Wilson returned to his place by his laptop. "What are you doing over there anyways, Sam?"

"Found an interesting website about conspiracy theories. It's got everything from UFO sightings to the government putting mind control devices in silverware." Sam shook his head at the absurdity of that last statement and continued on. "It's even got a few in here about us. A couple about where Thor and Hulk are. One about Vision being a time traveler who went back in time and invented the computer. And one about Nat being a sleeper agent for the Albanian mafia."

"Those brickheads aren't worth my time," Romanoff responded to the claim without gazing up from her book, flipping to the next page casually. Steve couldn't help but suppress a smile.

"Are any of them actually good?" he wondered.

"I don't know," Sam stated. "It's hard to pick out any good ones out of the waves of the ones claiming 9/11 was an inside job. It just repeats the same thing over and over again. 'Bush did 9/11.'"

Clint finally broke his silence, saying under his breath "Jet fuel can't melt steel beams" while chuckling to himself. The other three guys in the room just looked at him with faces mixed with disbelief and uncertainty. The sharpshooter known as Hawkeye was slightly surprised at their reactions. "What?" he asked, attempting to justify himself. "I got kids at home. They're trying to get me into the Internet and these things they call memes."

"Anyway…" Bucky went on, hoping to change the subject back on topic. "What else does it have?"

"Here's one about the Kennedy assassination. Now this is a theory that could hold some water to it," Sam said.

"The assassination of JFK. Must've been a sad day for America," Steve added. "Not that I would've known, but John F. Kennedy seemed a like a good and charismatic man. A leader everyone can get behind."

"He was a man that had made a lot of rivals and enemies in the political arena," Natasha corrected, finally taking her attention off her book. She puts it on the arm of her chair and stands up, adjusting her shorts in the process. "It isn't a stretch to say that there were a lot of powerful men on Capitol Hill whose lives would have been much easier with President Kennedy out of the picture."

"Oh c'mon Nat. Not everything is just government carrying out corrupt business," Captain Rogers pleaded.

"What makes you think that I'm automatically blaming the government?" she questioned.

"You are the woman who leaked a ton of formerly top secret files to the public while telling DC to kiss her ass a couple of years ago," Sam brought up. Natasha just shrugged and shook her head, desperately trying to find some sort of answer to that remark.

"Well there was probably one sleazy politician that got really excited because he took me literally," she commented.

"Really? Is that what you came up with?" Barton directed amidst laughter toward his partner. She just shrugged again in response and motioned that it was probably true before continuing on her point.

"CIA had been involved in plots targeting foreign leaders before at the time. And a lot of Kennedy's associates were left angered after his decision to walk away from the Cold War and make peace with the USSR. What's against saying that somebody decided to use that CIA secretive power on its country's own leader? Not to mention there were several accused conspirators arrested linked to the CIA's espionage activities. The tramps."

"I'm sorry, Nat, but I refuse to believe that this was an inside job. A firmly planted country like the United States would have the sense to realize that killing its leader solves nothing," the captain fired back.

"That's incredibly naïve," Sam responded to his friend. "To say that the USA's leaders have the sense of morality everyone should strive for is just a downright lie. I mean, even most of the civilian public questioned if the conclusion they were handed lined up with the facts. All it takes is just a couple disgruntled CIA agents with power, maybe with ties to mafia criminals angered with Kennedy's cracking down on their illegal activities, and they can carry this out."

"You've never seemed smarter, Sam," Agent Romanov said, satisfied that he was proving her point.

"It's hard to get a read to agree with you with this whole double agent shtick you got." This knocked the smile off of her face and instead placed it on Sam's. His smile turns innocent, signaling he's joking, while also taking pride in the burn he had just delivered. All Clint could do was nod to himself; any other sign of approval he gave Sam would have put him in serious trouble with Natasha. She had a perfected art form of getting back at him after all these years working together.

Despite this explanation, Rogers remained adamant that American officials were not the ones pulling the trigger aimed at JFK. "What about a plot done by foreign authorities? KGB operatives?" he questioned. "They could've created the lie that Americans killed their own President, and it got repeated so much that it became truth."

"Doubtful. It would be difficult to make the assumption that Lee Harvey Oswald had influence from Moscow. They had other things to deal with," Nat said.

"Oh really? You don't think that killing the highest official in the world they're at odds with wouldn't be their number 1 priority? It was known that Oswald had a Russian wife, and her immigrant papers had her marked as born from a different city than her Leningrad accent suggested. That's a practice the KGB specialized in in order for accused agents to avoid being traced back to them," he replied. He folded his arms, feeling a tinge of pride. He had done a lot of research on world events he had missed while being asleep in the ice, and this assassination was one that especially captured his attention.

"Well one thing's for certain," Clint chimed in from across the room while putting the arrow he was fiddling with back into his quiver. He slowly got up and strutted his way to the center of the conversation and continued on. "What the authorities told the American people is false." This caught Steve's attention and even slightly provoked his ire. Being such close friends with Hawkeye, he half expected him to back up his case.

Clint began moving around in order to paint a picture to help himself and his comrades alike visualize the picture in his mind. As he did this, he talked through his steps. "So here's the Continental. Here's the building. And here's the balcony with Oswald on it. Looking at the trajectory and the shot he had on the President, he would've hit him right here," he says while placing a finger on his neck. "But the autopsy showed he had holes on his neck and his shoulder, a shoulder he wouldn't have been able to hit from his point of view. Not unless they had some special ricochet bullet that I don't even think can be done today with SHIELD's tech."

Everyone stopped and reflected for a moment to take in this new bit of information Barton just added. No one knew more about line of sights and trajectories than the Avengers' resident marksman. This was his expertise, his bread and butter; no one in the world could potentially match his knowledge, especially when in action.

As Rogers tried to formulate a response to this, he looked over and noticed Bucky just sitting there somewhat awkwardly. Ever since the debate had started, he had gone quiet. Like Steve, he was also incapable of recalling the event, but he never had the chance to perform the research. Steve knew that he couldn't add much to the conversation, but at the same time, he didn't want to leave him by himself, lost in the words and facts being thrown at one another.

"Hey Buck. What do you think about the JFK assassination?" Steve asked, hoping to include his friend in the discussion while asking a question that didn't require too much detail from him. Bucky just looked down, arms resting on his knees, then back up, his hair pushed out of his eyes. He finally manages to muster a response, and even then he barely is able to squeak it out, his tone fallen to a low whisper.

"I… I think I did."

Everybody went quiet.


End file.
